Bioinformatics for Beginners – R

No, today is not Talk Like A Pirate Day. “R” is a statistical software (more like an environment) which was inspired by “S” and was originally developed by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka. Nowadays, more than a dozen contributors are working on development and bug fixes. There are also more than 4700 extensions (called “packages” in R-lingo) written and shared by R users.

R logo

In my opinion, the three most important things you should now about R are the following:

  1. It’s free.
  2. It’s platform independent.
  3. You can use it for basically anything (if you don’t believe me take a look at the project tree).

A few bits and bobs for getting started with R:

  • The official webpage,
  • Downloads, archive and packages: CRAN
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • User Manuals (Yes, as in more than one.)
  • R Wiki
  • The official citation for R:
    R Core Team (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical
    computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
    URL http://www.R-project.org/.